Time for a Change: Exploring New Avenues for Email Collection Preservation
Presenter:
Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig
Description:
The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives (SLA) has been collecting and preserving email for more than 15 years and led an early email preservation project called CERP that resulted in an XML preservation format and software applications. Even though tools like Teams and Slack are replacing some email usage, the reliance on email in many organizations has continued for communication. Market research group Radicati noted that business and consumer email messages per day would be more than 333 billion in 2022 and will reach more than 392 billion in 2026.
The last few years have resulted in various email collection projects that include ePADD+, Mailbag, and RATOM, and literature from the field has focused on topics including email preservation and specifications. This is the right time for SLA to rethink our email collection processes from ingest to processing/appraisal to preservation and access.
SLA has made adjustments in recent years to its workflows to assist in appraisal and accessioning, but backlogs have continued as more frequent and larger collections are acquired thanks to larger mailbox size limits and cloud-based applications. As an early tester of Phase 1 of ePADD, SLA has closely watched developments and was delighted to see the ePADD+ project offering additional features. Participating as a 2022 ePADD+ community tester reinforced the idea of exploring a change.
This lightning talk will focus on the initial results of exploring tools like ePADD+ and incorporating revised workflows. The intended audience is anyone who acquires or is planning the acquisition of email collections.
Understanding the visualisation needs of researchers using email archives
Presenter:
Peter Green
Description:
Providing access to email archives for researchers will include providing visualisations which have long been seen as a potential solution to the challenges of working with email archives. However, there is little research that covers the visualisation needs of researchers in this context. The research I will be undertaking as part of my Doctoral thesis will help to close that knowledge gap. I will identify a cohort of researchers, experienced in working with correspondence held in cultural institutions, and engage with them using semi-structured interviews within a qualitative research methodology. These interviews will explore how the researchers go about their research, what they need to help them achieve their research goals, and what forms of email visualisation would best meet their needs. The outcomes of this research will be used to guide the development and deployment of visualisation of email archives in cultural institutions and will fill a significant knowledge gap.
In the Lightning Talk I will present a brief overview of my proposed research and timeline. I hope to get questions and feedback, perhaps offline after the session, that will help inform my research.
This research will be of interest to anyone who is managing email archives and pondering how they will be used by researchers in the future.
Event Timeslots (2)
Day Three – June 15
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Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig
Day Three – June 15
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Peter Green